If there is a better window in the world than my portlight in Burra I
do not know it. I look out on space from that opening in the topworks
of a village which at night is amid the stars and in daylight is at
sea. My cubicle is shady, but the light outside may be bright enough to
be startling when of a morning it wakes me. I sit up in bed, wondering
whether our ship is safe. The portlight seems too high and bright. The
eyes are dazzled by the very chariot-spokes of Apollo, and ocean can be
heard beneath me, vast and sonorous. The senses shrink, for they feel
exposed and in danger. But all is well. Our ship that is between the
sky and the deep has weathered more than two thousand years, and no
more has happened to it than another fine day. Burra has not run into
the sun.
From my bed to-day the first thing I saw was a meteor flaming alongside
us. But my window kept pace with it. The speed of the streaming meteor
was terrific, but it could not pass us. Soon the meteor was resolved
into the gilded vane of a topmast; I understood that a strange ship
had come in. Nothing but time was passing my window. Yet still I had
no doubt that the light in the east beyond the ship’s vane, ascending
splendid terraces of cloud to a choir which, if empty, was so monitory
that one felt trivial and unprepared beneath it for any announcement by
an awful clarion, was a light to test the worth of a dark and ancient
craft like Burra. I listened for sounds of my fellow-travellers. They
were silent. There was an ominous quiet, as if I were the first to know
of this new day.
Then I just heard some subdued talk below, and the sounds of a boat
moving away. As the speakers drew apart they called aloud. Yeo was
off to fish by the Middle Ridge. The shipyard began its monody. One
hears the shipyard only when its work begins. That means we are all
awake. Those distant mallets continue in a level, confident chant, the
recognised voice of our village. But by the time breakfast is over the
fact that Burra is still building ships is no more remarkable than
the other features of the Estuary; the ears forget the sound. Only if
it ceased should we know that anything was wrong. For a minute or two
no doubt we should wonder what part of our life had stopped. But the
hammering has not ceased here since the first galley was built, which
was before even the Danes began to raid us. The Danes found here, we
have been told, seafarers as stout as themselves, with ships as good
as their own, and got the lesson that, if quiet folk always acted with
such fierce promptitude and resolution when interfered with, then this
would be an unlucky world for pirates.
Yet have no fear. I am not going to write a history of Burra. There was
a time when I would have begun that history with no more dubiety than
would a man an exposition of true morality. But the more we learn of a
place the less is our confidence in what we know of it. We understand
at last that the very stones mock our knowledge. They have been there
much longer. I do feel fairly certain, however, that absolute truth is
not at the bottom of any particular well of ours. This village, which
stands round the base of the hill where the moors decline to the sea
and two rivers merge to form a gulf of light, is one I used to think
was easily charted. But what do I know of it? The only certainty about
it to-day is that it has a window which saves the trouble of searching
for a better. Beyond that window the clouds are over the sea. The
clouds are on their way. The waters are passing us. So, when I look out
from my portlight to learn where we are, I can see for myself there may
be something in that old legend of a great stone ship on an endless
voyage. I think I may be one of its passengers. For where is Burra? I
never know. The world I see beyond the window is always different. We
reach every hour a region of the sky where man has never been before,
so the astronomers tell us, and my window confirms it. Ours is a
celestial voyage, and God knows where. So I dare not assume that I have
the knowledge to write up the log-book of Burra. I should very much
like to meet the man who could do it. We certainly have a latitude and
longitude for the aid of commercial travellers and navigators who want
our address, and it is clear that they too, as they seem able to find
us so easily, must be keeping pace with us; that they are on the same
journey as ourselves to the same distant and unknown star; but when one
night I ventured to hint this surmise, as a joke, to an experienced
sailor who came in for a pipe with me, he said he had never heard of
that particular star; all the stars he knew were named. He said it was
easy for him to lay a course for Burra, anyhow, and to keep it, just
by dead reckoning. Besides--he pointed out--how could a man learn his
whereabouts from a star he didn’t know and couldn’t see? Yes; how could
he? But it is no joke. That old mariner had never heard of the perilous
bark which some men have to keep pumped watertight, and to steer in
seas beyond all soundings by a star whose right ascension can be
judged only by inference, and by faith that is sometimes as curiously
deflected as is any compass.
When taking bearings from my window, merely to get the time of day,
I can see the edge of the quay below and a short length of it. That
gives promise enough that Burra is of stout substance, and rides well.
A landing-stage, a sort of stone gangway, is immediately under the
window. Whoever comes aboard or leaves us, I can see them. At low
tide these stone stairs go down to a shingle beach where ketches and
schooners rest on their bilges, their masts at all angles. Corroded
anchors and chains lie littered about. In summer-time I smell tar
and marine dissolution. Morning and those stairs connect us with the
fine things that the important people are doing everywhere. Open boats
with lug sails bring gossips and the news from the other side of the
water, and on market-day bring farmers and their wives with baskets of
eggs, chickens, butter, and vegetables, and perhaps a party of tourists
to gaze at us curiously and sometimes with disparagement. Few objects
look so pleasant as a market-basket nearly full of apples, and with
some eggs on top. Yet it is well to admit, and here I do it, that there
are visitors who call Burra a dull and dirty little hole.
[Illustration:
_At low tide these stone stairs go down to a
shingle beach_--
]
Indeed, there is no telling how even my window in Burra will take a
man. Once I brought a friend to sit with me, so that he could watch
the ferry and the boats, the dunes on the far sides, and the clouds.
I thought, with him as look-out astern, he could tell me when a ship
came down river, and I could warn him when I saw a vessel appear at the
headland (out of nowhere, apparently), and stand in for the anchorage.
What more could he want? But he said the place was dead. He complained
that nothing happened there.
I don’t know what he wanted to happen there. It gives me enough to
think about. I always feel that plenty is happening to me as I watch
those open boats. When a Greek vase is the equal of one of them in
grace it is the treasure of a national museum. But our men can build
such craft in their spare hours. The human mind, confused still and
thick with the dregs of the original mud, has clarified itself to that
extent. It would not be easy to prove that man has made anything more
beautiful than one of our boats. Its lines are as delicate and taut
as a dove’s. It is quick and strong, and it is so poised that it will
change, when going about, as though taken by a sudden temerarious
thought; and then in confidence it will lift and undulate on a new
flight. The balance and proportions of its body accord with all one
desires greatly to express, but cannot. In that it is something like
music. The deep satisfaction to be got from watching a huddle of these
common craft, vivacious but with wings folded, and tethered by their
heads to the landing-stairs, each as though eagerly looking for the man
it knows, will send me to sleep in a profound assurance that all is
well. For they seem proper in that world beyond my window, where there
is the light and space of freedom. The tide is bright with its own
virtue. The range of sandhills across the Estuary is not land, nothing
that could be called soil, but is a promise, faint but golden, far in
the future. You know that some day you will land there. But there is
plenty of time for that. There is no need to hurry. It is certain the
promise is for you. One may sleep.
After dark, like a fabulous creature, Burra vanishes. There is little
here then, except an occasional and melancholy sound. I have for
companionship at the window at night only a delicate star-cluster,
low in the sky, which is another village on the opposite shore. Maybe
Burra too, is a star-cluster, when seen from the other stars, and from
that distance perhaps appears so delicate as to make its indomitable
twinkling wonderful on a windy night. There are a few yellow panes here
after sunset, and they project beams across the quay, one to make a
hovering ghost of a ship’s figure-head, and another to create a lonely
bollard--the last relic of the quay--and another to touch a tiny patch
of water which is lively, but never flows away, perhaps because the
Estuary has vanished and it has nowhere to go. It prefers to stay in
the security of the beam till morning.
Now it is curious, but after dark, when our place has disappeared
except for such chance fragments, and when to others we can be but
a few unrelated glints among the other stars, that Burra is most
populous, warm, and intimate. I see it then for what it is, a vantage
for a few of us who know each other, and who are isolated but feel
secure in the unseen and hitherto untravelled region of space where the
sun has abandoned us. All around us is bottomless night. Our nearest
neighbour is another constellation.